It wasn’t long after that the whispers started at school. Ash and I had had a falling-out, a “lover’s quarrel.” People stared at me when I walked down the hallway, laughing and cupping their hands to each other’s ears as they quietly but not nearly discreetly enough talked about me. I’d ignored the name-calling, freak and weirdo were nothing new, but then my notebook had fallen out of my bag and brotherfucker had been added to the ever-growing list, filling me with so much shame I’d wished myself dead. Back then I hadn’t told Ash about my new nickname for months, and now that he was home again and couldn’t remember any of it, I certainly wasn’t about to bring it up.

He looked at me as we sat at the kitchen table, his expectant expression transforming to frustration. How long had I silently reminisced? I gave him some succinct details about Celine, just enough of the truth to satiate his curiosity, finishing with, “You were close. Boyfriend and girlfriend for a while but a little before your seventeenth birthday, she left.”

“Where did she go?”

I closed my eyes for a moment, told Ash how I remembered the sharp knock on the door one morning. It had come a few months after the rock-meets-window incident. Mom had answered and Celine’s mother, smelling of stale booze and cigarettes, ranted and raved about how Celine had left a note, saying she was running away. After Mom assured her Celine wasn’t at our house, and Ash was working, she’d left, but the next evening the cops showed up.

“They asked all of us questions about Celine,” I said. “And they spent ages asking you when you’d last seen her, and where you’d been.”

“They think I had something to do with her leaving?” he said.

“Not really. With the note she left about running away, and when you told them her father beat her, and Keenan and Fiona confirmed it, things changed.”

“How?”

“Her parents had to accept the truth. She ran away because of them. Her father was an alcoholic, a heavy-handed prick, and her mom had done nothing to stop him. She was usually too off her face to try.”

“Did Celine come back? Did they find her?” Ash asked, and I shook my head. “And Keenan still thinks I had something to do with her going away after all this time? Why?”

“Because he’s an asshole and you shouldn’t listen to him. It took him a while to stop throwing accusations around, then he left town for a few years and when he came back we thought he’d accepted you had nothing to do with Celine leaving, but then Kate...”

Ash looked at me. “Who is she?”